The Center for Rural Ministry aims to serve “college, church, and community” by connecting pastors, congregations, students, and faculty with resources and support in a variety of ways. However, Eric Fehr, Assistant Dean of Student Life and Learning at Grove City College, saw another avenue for the CRM to explore – leaders of parachurch campus ministries.
“There are thousands of people that we probably can refer to as missionaries all around the country that are doing things on college campuses,” he explained. “Like through CCO, which is present here on Grove City’s campus.”
Fehr has now stepped into a new role with the CRM of Campus Ministry Liaison, with the hope of spearheading and strengthening these new relationships.
“Part of what I'm doing as the Campus Ministry Liaison with CRM is trying to find: what are the inroads with campus ministry? Specifically, who are some of those in Student Life that we can invite to speak into what the CRM is doing, and how can rural pastors partner with them?” he explained.
“How can rural ministry leaders tap into these ministries to support the things that they can't do themselves? Often rural churches don't have the capacity or the finances to hire someone new who's going to do the ’next gen thing,’ and so how do you join the team of local campus ministry professionals who are already going out to make disciples of college students?”
Fehr’s goal is to help parachurch ministry workers connect students into local congregations for continued discipleship. This passion comes from Fehr’s own testimony: “I came to Jesus through a parachurch campus ministry at a rural college, and I now work in Student Life, where I love working with pastors and making partnerships. So, seeing the opportunity to engage that partnership from my position in Student Life, but also my network within the campus ministry world, just seemed like it made sense.”
Three Main Emphases
His initial vision for developing the role has three main angles. He started by creating some new resources, including blog posts and a podcast episode already available on the CRM website, that share more about his passion. He has also helped to develop a new track for the annual CRM conference specifically for pastors and ministry leaders interested in ministry to college students.
And he is working to add Grove City College to the quickly growing EveryCampus Movement network of colleges across the country that have campus ministries and outreach programs. EveryCampus recognizes that more than half of college campuses in the US have no established programs for Christian community for students. They offer resources to start campus ministries and share prayer walk pointers to encourage Christians to consider how they could partner with a campus and their Christian ministries.
Looking forward, he is considering initiating an affinity group to support campus ministry leaders, who may experience isolation and loneliness, especially in remote rural campuses or campuses that don’t already have a body of believers.
The Need for Community
His desire to see students and churches connect and flourish comes from a rich theology of why we need community in our faith. “A core to almost any student - I think to any human really - is that we want to belong to community,” he explained. “So, I think students who are looking for church are looking for a church community; they want to belong to something.”
“And so rural churches can do that so much better than many urban churches, which are just so huge, with so many people. It's so easy to walk in and walk out and never feel like you were seen. It is a benefit for the rural church that they can walk in, and everyone will see them - people will know that they're there, and they'll recognize when they're not there. So it provides a sense of ultimate belonging, or even unavoidable belonging.”
“I think for the rural church, college students matter because churches want to bless the next generation. Scripture calls us to bless the next generation, and it does so from the level of family obligations, right? So, Proverbs says that ’a fool leaves nothing behind for his children's children’ and highlights our thinking about the next generation and the next generation…Rural churches want to care for the next generation. The opportunity that students have is to bless the rural church, where there's often not as many of the ’next generation’ sitting in pews and pouring in.”
“My father-in-law loves to say that there’s that spiritual gift, ‘those who give will be blessed,’ but someone has to be willing to receive, right? So there's that kind of spiritual gift of ‘receivership,’ and I think college students are really good at receiving. So, I think the rural church has a lot of opportunity for college students to just receive love and care.”
As Eric Fehr continues in his new role of Campus Ministry Liaison, he asks for prayer for himself and the campus ministry leaders with whom he is working to establish this new effort of the CRM.
Anastasia Brown is a senior English Secondary Education major at Grove City College. She also serves as writing fellow for the Center for Rural Ministry.
